I bowed without speaking.
"Would you prefer to tell Violet, or shall I?" she asked.
"Perhaps, as Jim's mother——"
"I should prefer you to do it," I said, "as soon as you think it's safe."
"Very well. As regards the boy—I've not sent any announcement to the papers."
"I will see to that," I said.
After calling at the offices of "The Times" and "Morning Post," I wrote letters to ten or twelve people including O'Rane and Laurence. Thinking over the events of the day as I walked home from the Club, I could not help feeling that one of the hardest things to bear in all the war was the courage of the women.
IV
A week or two elapsed before I received any acknowledgement from Melton. Then my cousin wrote a letter designed to release both myself and O'Rane from obligations, to convey an invitation for Speech Day and as long afterwards as I could spare for Raney's tried and approved spare room, and finally to impart a great deal of such miscellaneous information as my cousin thought would interest me or seemed suitable for treatment by an epistolary method in which he took considerable pride.
"This is awful news about Jim," he wrote. "Though I really hardly knew him, he seemed an awful good sort—white all through. The Panther says I haven't gone half far enough. It was an awful shock for him, poor chap. I usually roll round after Early School on my way to breakfast, just to read him his letters and the headlines in the paper. I found your fist staring at me, so I told the Panther and read out the letter. If I'd had time to read my own first, I might have let him down easier: as it was, I was frightfully abrupt.